How Do Cats Use Their Whiskers? Slow-Motion | Cats Uncovered | BBC Earth

As our brains are flooded with information about patterns and colors through Callie's eyes, rapid movements trumping all as she stalks flies, her eyes sending signals to the brain's visual cortex, which analyzes what has changed between a image and the next up to 70 times per second faster than the human brain, and a much larger proportion of the neurons in Callie's brain are dedicated exclusively to

motion

detection. She almost can't help but attack the

cats

. Their wild ancestors relied on low-light vision and the ability to detect

motion

to stalk prey, but these evolutionary adaptations have a drawback: Cats can't focus on anything that's closer than 30 centimeters to them, But when

their

eyes fail them,

cats

have another sense perfectly adapted to go in for the kill.

The team has set up an experiment to reveal how Our Cat's Secret Weapon works so that the camera can run in Full HD resolution up to 2700 frames per second. They thought about me 20 30 times. John Bradshaw hopes these ultra-high-speed cameras will capture this extraordinary sensory organ in action. It really is very, very fast. I've seen still photographs of what happened, but there's nothing like actually seeing the whole movement, so I think we've got it there, but it's very, very, very fast. John is trying to watch the cat's

whiskers

as they move toward Attack Position. Let's just take the Play for a second and that's it, we can take a look at what we just took.

Well, here we go. The cat is aware of masses within its pasture, but wants to know exactly where it is in relation to its mass. His eyes give up. Because they can't focus very close, that's where the

whiskers

take over, so we can see that the whiskers suddenly move forward and now the claws come into action, so we get here. Look, the whiskers point almost directly in front of the cat. nose, in fact, is catching them with its claws as it sweeps them trying to catch the mouse, but the small muscles at the base of each whisker are pulling hard to move them forward completely out of the normal position.

It's really extraordinarily detailed. He had never done it. Expected to see all of this, it all seems to take place in about a fifth of a second, which shows how fast cats' reflexes really are from the point where they move

their

whiskers forward, where the muscles contract and then contract. They relax back and the whiskers spring back. Once again, the mouse doesn't stand a chance. The hairs are much thicker and longer than normal ones. The whiskers also lie three times deeper in the skin, where they attach to nerve endings, telling the cat how far each one bends back and how quickly their whiskers match.

The width of their body allows cats to navigate the narrowest of spaces. Cats also have whiskers above their eyes and on their ankles, sending them a constant stream of information as they perceive the world around them.